It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on Ren & Stimpy, is virtually plot-free — nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its threadbare story…
“Somewhere this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (thereafter known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, it rang true. For an entire generation the Star Wars trilogy could never be…
Kicking & Screaming might be the most predictable movie of the year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it: How many times have you gone to a movie and gotten far less than you were expecting? Here that’s not a concern; you might not get more than…
Whatever you do, don’t accuse Ridley Scott of turning his back on a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s slimy-fanged space aliens attacking Sigourney Weaver, Roman slaves in tough against hungry lions down at the Coliseum, or American GIs going at it with Somali insurgents. Sir Ridley is always happy to…
If you’re expecting a psychological thriller out of Mindhunters, and you buy a ticket for the movie, you will indubitably feel cheated. But break down the film’s title to its most literal sense — hunting for a mind, presumably because those involved were out of theirs — and you’ll know…
It is no great joy to review Palindromes, the latest film from writer-director Todd Solondz, who is loved by those who do not loathe him for such movies as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling. Advance word had Palindromes as Solondz’s most shocking film, which seemed impossible, given its…
Much of Crash, an LA-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters — the creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis but also representations of people who live next door to and perhaps even inside of you — say…
Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you. Though it’s acted almost completely by children, Nobody Knows is not a film for children. A poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect and abandonment — all the more disturbing for being based on a true incident — this Japanese film (with English…
Agent Fox Mulder, the coolly instinctual sleuth of The X-Files, got pretty good at unraveling paranormal mysteries. If only the actor who played him were as adept at solving the riddle of his movie career. David Duchovny’s new vanity project, House of D, is the tortured tale of a thirteen-year-old…
Back for a seventh year, the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival kicks off an early hot summer with ten days of movies, parties, and pride. Indies and majors from here and from abroad come together April 22 when Craig Lucas’s highly anticipated The Dying Gaul opens the festival as…
It is both quite a coup and a kooky touch to have landed Bea Arthur as the gala diva of ceremonies of the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The Tony-winning, Emmy-hoarding, age-defying human rights activist and entertainment dynamo will perform a short version of her acclaimed one-woman show, And…
“No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer-director-star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work — it’s a direct…
Latin in the truest and broadest sense of that beauteous word, the Miami Latin Film Festival brings us movies not only from Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, and Costa Rica but also from France and Italy as well as, of course, Spain. This year’s edition, which opens Thursday (April 14)…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock again of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most…
What if a man has no friends? What if he speaks only when spoken to, and then only of the weather? What if every day of the week he attends mass, serves as a janitor, and retires to a one-room studio, emerging only to return to work? What happens to…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a ten-year period, as storyboards for the movie…
A spin-off of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days — as tepid sitcom, benign product, and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of the charmingly lightweight 2002 hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for…
Better than I thought it’d be” was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who, which doesn’t mean much — freebie audiences expect nothing and usually receive it. But in this case it neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once…
The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, offered sufficient closure that it didn’t exactly demand a sequel. The horror lay in wondering why a mysterious videotape kills viewers seven days after they watch it; to a lesser extent, there was the mystery of the creepy girl, face…
Let the lady gloat. Ellen Wedner, director of the 2005 Miami Jewish Film Festival, has a point when she boasts of this year’s “wonderful festival filled with a huge diversity of film topics.” She’s not kidding. With pictures from Israel, Argentina, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Uganda, Luxembourg, Italy, the Netherlands,…
Everyone with a TV set remembers President Bush in the flight suit, landing on that aircraft carrier, standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, and triumphantly declaring that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Two years on, many feel like asking what exactly he meant by that. Gunner…
